Gun Bans and "Schindler's List"

"I think that Schindler's List
should be required viewing
for everybody in this room." Schindler's List,
of course, is the
Academy Award-winning movie about the Holocaust. The speaker was crime victim
Suzanna Gratia, and the setting was a U.S. House subcommittee hearing on the
so-called "assault- weapon" ban. Among the people who Dr. Gratia felt should be
required to view this movie were two congressmen supportive of the most
restrictive gun controls: Jewish Congressman Charles Schumer (D-New York), and
Black Congressman Mel Reynolds (D-Illinois). She may as well have been speaking
to a couple of sign posts.

Then again, maybe seeing
the movie would not have helped Representative Schumer or Reynolds, since the
movie omitted a critical part of the real story: the part where Schindler gives
all the Jews semiautomatic rifles. According to Mr. Schindler's wife Maria, when
Schindler decided to liberate his Jewish workers, he handed them all
semiautomatic weapons so they could fight the Nazis.

In today's politically
correct Hollywood, Steven Speilberg probably would have ruined his chances for
an Oscar by telling the whole
story about Oskar Schindler's devotion to freedom.

The notion that genocide
victims such as Bosnians or Rwandans should fight back, rather than counting on
the United Nations or Bill Clinton to save their lives is not heard very often
on the weekly news analysis programs.

Even some survivors of the
Holocaust seem to think that we'll all be safer if only the government has all
the force. Consider the following letter that recently appeared in
Guns
& Ammo magazine:

"I am a survivor of the Nazi death camp Treblinka and I remember just like it
was yesterday how the Nazis came and forced me out or my home and into the
death camp with their automatic weapons. I managed to survive the Holocaust
and came to the United States. I settled in New York and saw gun violence
everywhere. Later I learned that the United States says that Americans
actually have a right to own guns. I just couldn't believe it and I promised
myself to do all I could to stop the violence. I am writing this letter- to
every pro-gun magazine in the United States hoping that maybe just one gun
owner will decide to do the right thing and turn his guns in to the
authorities."

We still wonder if this letter should be taken at face value. Surely any
Holocaust survivor would recognize that the guns used to victimize him or her
were in the hands of the authorities; the same authorities that forbade the
victims to possess guns for their own defense. And yet the views expressed by
the writer, Samuel Goldberg. concerning the civilian possession of guns are
apparently shared by many of the most politically and culturally influential of
his ethnic kin in this country - politicians such as Schumer and Senators Howard
Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California), plus a long list of
other politicians, academics, and news and entertainment media personalities, But the lessons of the
Holocaust weren't lost on Israel, where al law-abiding citizens are allowed to
own and carry guns. Whatever else may befall Israel, the people there will
never be murdered en masse by a dictatorial
government. You see, in every one of the major genocides of the 20th century
(Nazi, Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, Ugandan, Guatemalan, and Armenian), the
victims were first disarmed.

As detailed in the new
book Lethal Laws
by Jay
Simkin, Aaron Zelman, and Alan M. Rice, not every country
with repressive gun laws has genocide. but every country with genocide has
repressive gun laws. Put another way, a well-armed populace is a very
effective guarantee against mass murder by the government.

So in response to Mr.
Goldberg's letter telling people to give the government their guns, Aaron Lippman
wrote back that his Holocaust-survivor father insisted that "never again
would he or his family be rounded up like sheep for the slaughter! They would
have the will, the training, and the means to fight back. He taught us that
to die fighting tyranny like this is preferable to what happened to our family
and relatives under the Nazis."

Even the scholarly and
very liberal Constitutional law professor Sanford Levinson, no gun enthusiast,
has acknowledged that "a state facing a tota11y disarmed population is in a
far better position, for good
or ill, to suppress popular demonstrations and uprisings than one that must
calculate the possibilities of its soldiers and officials being injured of
killed."

Likewise, not all
prominent blacks are as eager as Mel Reynolds to remove from the Bill of Rights
a right which was so long denied blacks. After all, not being able to possess
guns was a condition of slavery that guaranteed that slaves would remain
slaves, and Blacks still have to look out for themselves in many parts of
this country. Long-time National Chairman of the Congress of Racial
Equality, Roy Innis, economists Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, are
among the prominent blacks who strongly reject the notion that law-abiding
Americans must be disarmed to combat high rates or black-on-black violence.

It's true, of course,
that a risk associated with an armed populace is that occasionally even an
individual who isn't part of the thug subculture may harm innocents with
his weapons. Doctor Gratia herself survived a shooting rampage by a
madman in a Texas cafeteria, Her parents weren't so lucky.

However, the risk
associated with an unarmed populace is that it can be enslaved or
annihilated by a rogue government. Throughout history. the unarmed have been
safe only as long as the armed (criminals or government agents) have allowed
them to be safe. And Dr. Gratia reminded Representatives Schumer and Reynolds,
our right to keep and bear arms was intended mainly as a means of protection
against the kind of tyranny that the Founding Fathers knew was always
possible, unless human nature were miraculously changed.

Of course, the idea
that
government should be kept under strict control, or the idea that
government could one day start killing people is deeply offensive to the
statist movers and shakers of the gun control movement, including the current occupants of the
White House. The dangers posed by government
apparently are conveniently forgotten by many who become part
of it.

William R. Tonso is a
professor of Sociology at the University of Evansvil1e. David B. Kopel is
Research Director of the Independence Institute, a think-tank in Golden,
Colorado.

Share this page:

Click
the icon to get RSS/XML updates of this website, and of Dave's articles.

Make a donation to support Dave Kopel's work in defense of constitutional
rights and public safety.

Nothing written here is to be construed as
necessarily representing the views of the Independence Institute or as an
attempt to influence any election or legislative action. Please send
comments to Independence Institute, 727 East 16th Ave., Colorado 80203. Phone 303-279-6536. (email) webmngr @ i2i.org